Unable to render...

[harris.patty]

I just installed a new copy of Maya2013 education version. I have experience working in earlier versions of Maya. Made a small animation and am unable to render either a Quicktime movie or an individual frame. With individual frames, I get a number attached to the ext. (?) With multiple frames, as with Quicktime, I get a message:

// Warning: The post-processing failed while attempting to rename file /Users/pattyharris/Documents/maya/projects/default/images/tmp/scene1.qt.tmp

This is confusing as I have earlier .mb files saved to this same path. I was even unable to render in an earlier mb file that I had previosuly rendered in an earlier version of Maya.

Please advise. Thanks!

[n8skow]

Not much info to go on...

Any error messages in the script editor?

Render log?

[halfstone]

Just a few basic questions, or things to consider.  First of all, I never render to Quicktime or AVI; I recommend rendering a sequence of individual frames and compiling them to QT afterward in a program like After Effects.  The post processing error you're getting doesn't seem to be a bad path, only because you have been successful in writing a single frame to that path even though it's wrong.  It sounds more like a problem with Quicktime.  I don't use a Mac and I don't render compiled sequences, so those issues are foreign to me.  

That said, do you have the settings in the Render Settings indicated correctly?  If you're doing individual frames, your "Frame/Animation ext" should be set to "name.#.ext"; if the individual frames are getting a number appended AFTER the extension, this might be the culprit.  

After setting the name.#.ext, you need to set the Frame Range.  

Forgive me if these are overly basic - but they'd be the first place I'd look for a problem. 

If that doesn't resolve your issue, I'd recommend going directly to the command line render and see if that works.  On a Mac, you need to use the Maya terminal window - should be in the maya 2013 folder in your Applications directory. Once in the terminal window you need to navigate to the directory where your mb file lives with this command: 

cd /Users/pattyharris/Documents/maya/projects/default/scenes <enter>

Once there, type 

Render -r sw -of iff -fnc 2 scene1.mb

the flags are as follows: 

"-r sw" specifies the Maya software renderer.  If you're using mentalray, use "-r mr"

"-of iff" specifies the output format - in this case, iff.  If you want to use TIFF, you can use "-of tiff".  I'd start with iff

"-fnc 2" specifies the file name convention, which is an ordered list.  "-fnc 2" is the "name.#.ext" you're looking for.  

If none of this works, I'd need more information.  I'm happy to look at the file for you if you want. 

 There is a lot of documentation about how to use the command line renderer - I always use this when rendering a sequence; it seems to fix a lot of annoying little problems inside the package.